News Aggregators: Shining New Hope, or the Root of All Evil?

Modern journalism is in a state of panic over news aggregator services, like Google News, and while many people have already hopped on this new bandwagon it has left newspapers companies scratching their heads trying to keep up.

As newspapers continue to lose circulation, advertising revenue and are increasingly going out of business, the Federal Trade Commission has been looking at ways to save journalism. In order to accomplish their goal, the FTC has been open to public suggestion and some of the more recent ideas include: tax exemptions for news organizations, imposing a tax on iPads and other electronic devices, increasing funding for public broadcasting, and possible require news aggregators to pay news organizations for the use of online content, perhaps through the use of copyright licenses.

But with the increasing presence of government in American journalism comes blatant quandaries. For starters, if the government were to help fund news it would be questionable if a truly fair and un-biased news organization would even be possible. There is a clear conflict of interest between publicly funded news and privately funded news. An obvious example might include the government helping fund newspapers as long as the paper does not criticize the government in any fashion.

However, on the flip side of all these negatives are several positives. Because news aggregators use extensive, mathematically driven, algorithms, the news people are receiving is custom tailored to each users individual desires. So now people are more involved in news than ever before. Now-a-days, each person has the ability to decide what is newsworthy and what is not which also holds some potential shortcomings; such as limiting hard news that would be necessary to uphold democracy that would go un-read because it did not mesh with that particular person’s algorithm.

Personally, I do not believe that it’s aggregators that are the problem, rather, it’s the Gawker.com sites of the world, the sites that simply take news stories, rewrite them and compete with the originator without paying royalties. This is often the result of a paywall, which forces payment to view news stories.

For the time being, aggregators are only tools for casual news consumption and lack any real quality control. So now we are all forced to sit and wait in limbo to see what the future holds.